Financial instruments (loans, equity, guarantee funds and others) represent a potentially resource-efficient way of deploying ESI Funds public resources to target economically viable projects. This article discusses the scale and progress in implementing FIs in the funding period 14-20.

This dataset provides cumulative financial information on the different "financial Instruments" supported by each specific ESI Fund programme, for each year of implementation.

Financial instruments are an array of (mainly) repayable forms of financial support used under the ESI Funds to deliver public investment. Those forms of financial support include equity, loans and guarantees. More information on the use of financial instruments under the ESI Funds is presented on this website http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/funding/financial-instruments/ . There you will also find the "Annual Summaries of Data" prepared each year, which provide a description of the data as presented at a particular cut-off date.

This dataset presents information notified annually to the Commission by the national and regional programmes on the different financial instruments (fund of funds or specific funds) under the ESI Funds. This dataset will be updated regularly in order to show any corrections notified by the programmes during the quality checks and finalisation of the annual reports. For that reason the dataset may have more updated data than contained in the "Annual Summaries of Data".

In querying the dataset be aware of the following:
- The dataset presents cumulative values to the 31 December of each reference year, for multiple years (i.e. the 2018 value includes values already reported in 2017 and 2016). Therefore the values for different years **SHOULD NOT** be aggregated, but may be compared to see implementation progress;
- To calculate the total volume of financial instruments, aggregate only the values for "fund of funds" and "specific funds" in the column "FI type" ("Fund of fund specific funds" are a subset of the Funds of Funds);
- Given that (1) some financial instruments are funded by more than one programme and priority axis or measure and (2) there is separate reporting for each "fund of fund specific fund" under each "fund of fund", the number of rows in the dataset does not represent the total number of instruments but rather the total number of specific contributions from a priority axis of the operational programme (or measure in case of EAFRD).

In relation to guarantees,
- In column 'Total amount of programme contributions committed to final recipients', the amounts correspond to the amount of the programme contributions blocked (committed) in guarantee contracts signed, irrespective whether the loan was disbursed or not to final recipient;
- In the column 'Total amount of programme contributions paid to final recipients', the amounts correspond to the amount of the programme contributions blocked (committed) in guarantee contracts signed for loans which were disbursed to final recipients; irrespective whether the guarantee was called or not. In case of portfolio guarantees the amount is a portion of guarantee committed for loans paid to final recipients (in line with the multiplier ratio according to specific rules on guarantees delivered through financial instruments of Article 8 of Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) No 480/2014).